US Workforce Education

8/2/2019 US Workforce Education

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NOVEMBER 21, 2 005

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America TheUneducatedA new study warns of a slide for the U.S. as

the share of lower achievers grows

How did the U.S. become the world's larges t economy? Akey part of the answer is education. Some 85% of adult

Americans have at leas t a high school degree today, upfrom just 25% in 1940. Similarly, 28% have a collegedegree, a fivefold gain over this period. Today's U.S.workforce is the m ost educated in the world.

But now, for the first time ever, America's educational gains are poised to stall becauseof growing demographic trends. If these trends continue, the share of the U.S.

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workforce with high school and college deg rees m ay not only fail to keep rising over thenext 15 years but could actually decline slightly, warns a report released on Nov. 9 bythe National Center for Public Policy & Higher Education, a nonprofit group ba sed inSan Jose, Calif. The key reason: As highly educated baby boomers retire, they'll bereplaced by mounting numbers of young Hispanics and African Americans, who are farless likely to earn degrees.

Because workers with fewer years of education earn so much les s, U.S. livingstandards could take a dive unless s omething is done, the report argues. It calculatesthat lower educational levels could slice inflation-adjusted per capita incomes in theU.S. by 2% by 2020. They surged over 40% from 1980 to 2000.

Not everyone is s o pes simis tic. Education Secretary Margaret Spelling argues that

President Bush's 2001 education reform law, the No Child Left Behind Act, is workingto lift minority education levels. "It makes me bristle when I hear people say, 'There's noway in hell we can have our children reach grade-level proficiency,"' she says.

Still, the Center's projections are es pecially alarming in light of the s tartling educationalgains s o many other countries are achieving. U.S. high school math and readingscores already rank below those of most of the advanced economies in Europe and

Asia. Now education is exploding in countries s uch as China and India . There arenearly as many college students in China as in the U.S. Within a decade, theConference Board projects, students in s uch countries will be just as likely as those inthe U.S. and Europe to get a high s chool education. Given their much l argerpopulations, that should enable them to churn out far more college graduates as well.More U.S. white-collar jobs will then be likely to move offshore, warns National CenterPresident Patrick M. Callan. "For the U.S. economy, the implication of these trends isreally stark," he says.

Callan's projections are based on the growing diversity of the U.S. population. Asrecently as 1980, the U.S. workforce was 82% white. By 2020, it will be just 63% white.Over this 40-year span, the share of minorities will double, to 37%, as that of Hispanicworkers nearly triples, to 17%. The problem is, both Hispanics and African Americansare far less likely to earn degrees than their white counterparts. If those gaps persist,the number of Americans age 26 to 64 who do n't even have a high school degree couldsoar by 7 mi llion, to 31 mill ion, by 2020. Meanwhile, although the actual number ofadults with at least a college degree would grow, their share of the workforce could fallby a percentage point, to 25.5%.

STEEP SLIDE IN TEXASThese trends aren't carved in stone, of course. Bush's No Child law is helping to liftminority kids' test scores, says Jack Jennings, president of the Center on EducationPolicy, a Washington think tank that studies No Child. But the gaps are still enorm ous.

On the recently released National Assessm ent of Educational Progress exams, 39% ofwhite eighth graders were proficient in reading, vs. just 15% of His panics and only 12%of blacks. "Given these scores, there's no way the country will reach the 100%proficiency goal" of the No Child law, predicts Jennings.

Even with No Child, backslidin g already has happened in Texas, the laboratoryPresident George W. Bush used for the law when he was governor of the state. Why?The Lone Star State's Hispanic population is exploding. Because m inority students arefar more likely to drop out of high school, Texas now ranks dead last am ong the 50states in the percentage of adults who have a high school degree. That's down from39th in 1990.

Similarly, Texas ranks 35th among the states in the percentage of adults who have acollege degree, down from 23rd in 1990. State demographer Steve H. Murdock istelling anyone who will lis ten that Texas pu blic schools will be 80 % minority by 2040,
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up from 57% in 2000 . If the education gap persists, he warns, the income of theaverage Texas household will fall by $6,500 by 2040, after inflation adjustments --potentially fueling a sp ike in poverty, the prison population, and other s ocial problems ."We've been very hard hit," says Murdock.

In Texas and across the country, No Child's focus o n test results s kirts the biggestAchilles' heel o f the public school s: the growing dropout rate. Nationally, the on-timehigh school graduation rate is l ower now than it was in 1983, when the reportA Nationat Riskfirst sounded the alarm about the nation's failing schools, s ays Michael Cohen,president of Achieve Inc., a nonprofit school standards group created by governors andbusiness leaders.

In 2002 just 68% of high school students graduated four years after they started ninth

grade. That's down from 7 5% in the early 1980s. True, many later earn a generaleducational development degree. But the GED has never been the sam e as a highschool diplom a. Once students quit school, it's difficult for them to make it into college,says Thomas G. Mortenson, head ofPostsecondary Education Opportunity, a highereducation news letter.

Minority students who do get through high school face even greater obstacles inearning a bachelor's d egree. Because many come from l ow-income families, they havebeen hit espe cially hard by the shi ft in student financial aid policy away from need-based grants toward loans and merit scholarshi ps that favor the middle class . So just10% of students from the bottom quartile of family income brackets earn a BA by thetime they're 24, figures Mortenson, vs. 81% of those from the top quartile. "We are notdealing with the changing demography of the country," he says.

How can the trends be reversed? Jennings argues that the U.S. must push harder to

get better teachers into poorer s chools. States must als o work far harder to keepstudents from dropping out of high school even as they raise graduation requirements.Today, only about a third of high school grads are prepared for college, estimates

Achieve's Cohen. Many need remed ial cours es, a key reason why fewer than half ofthose who begin college earn a BA, says Cohen, whose group is working with 22states to raise their high school graduation requirem ents. And more generous financialaid could make it eas ier for low-income students to go to college.

The prospects for U.S. education levels are a lot like global warmi ng. Since erosionoccurs gradually, it's easy to ignore. But if the U.S. doesn't pay more attention,everything from its competitiveness to its s tandard of living could sink.

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